Midgard's Dragons

"All dragons seek to rule their provinces and to carve out power, the better to amass treasures. As their willing servants, dragonborn, kobolds, and drakes are rewarded with lands and wealth of their own. The dragons of Midgard have no interest in sitting in a lonely cave, counting coins. Their greed makes them ambitious, and that ambition makes them extremely dangerous." - Midgard Worldbook 5E, pg. 9.

I like aggressive, territorial, faction-building dragons, making them active participants worldwide. They seek to bully and take over humanoid tribes and groups in their area, especially using their power on those of dragon blood. D&D lost the plot when it removed humanoid monsters from the game, and lost what makes the higher-order enemies fun. Dragons that can't threaten and dominate the local intelligent evil monster factions become weak-sauce, high-hit-dice-in-a-room, combat filler.

With no evil factions of monsters that unite in like-minded groups for survival, every humanoid monster joins civilization, and a "points of light" campaign becomes impossible. D&D 2024 wrecks the world model built since the original D&D game started, and replaces it with a maddening neutral perspective where good and evil do not exist, and no intelligent creature should be judged.

D&D 2024 makes crafting adventures by the beginning GM much harder by limiting options and forcing flavorless role-based templates onto any humanoid creature. This renders them into generic enemy types, devoid of any culture, mannerisms, identity, and special traits of their kin. By trying to be overly sensitive and projecting others onto these kin, they bleached them into blandness and removed them from the game.

Typically, the community will step in and fill the gap, likely involving an expensive "Humanoids of D&D 5.5E" Kickstarter campaign to patch D&D again with another hardcover. It is a good thing, but I am tired of it.

D&D 2014's dragons felt more isolationist to me, more of your typical "dragon in a cave on a pile of treasure: than a scheming, plotting, conquering force that takes allies and makes them do their bidding. Midgard's dragons are brutal leaders who seek to take land, crush opposition, corrupt those they can't destroy, and build a lair as big as they can fly across.

Even ToV's dragons in the Monster Vault feel more like conquerors than hoarders. They are closer to Midgard's dragons in spirit. They are also wonderfully diverse and different, with green dragons being serial alchemists and experimenters. I can see them working alongside evil forest folk in their toxic experiments and strange concoctions, almost creating large "chem labs" in the forest that pollute and poison the woods. These dragons destroy the land as much as they kill their enemies.

I can see a red dragon burning all around them, creating massive forest fires to drive out those competing for their land, clear burning forests and hills, and the land being scarred and blackened by their presence. All dragons are destructive forces of nature and change.

You would never write such things if you were a lesser writer too afraid to trigger readers, which is the case with many new games. These companies can't hire creatives who would dare write something so horrible, and the sensitivity readers would scrub it clean for those who may be triggered by such calamities. Poisoning a forest and causing massive wildfires? That hits some too close to home.

Nothing good comes out of a system built on fear.

To which I answer, this is why we need heroes. We need heroes to stop the wildfires, save the forests, and stop the tribes that serve these beasts. There is a larger metaphor there that can't be told with D&D anymore. Everything in the world and the game is a call to action. The monsters reflect some of the horrors of this world, and give us a chance to conquer them.

These dragons are different and unique. I am still "unlearning bad D&D habits" and beginning to see things anew.